“There’s a pre-Nirvana record-industry perception of this kind of music,” says Gary Gersh, the Geffen Records A&R person who signed Nirvana. Although these bands were quite different from one another, and wildly competitive, they were all dubbed “foxcore.” And when Nirvana’s album Nevermind started to sell like mad, the so-called foxcore bands suddenly seemed commercially viable. ”Įven before Nirvana’s massive success, Hole was lumped with Babes in Toyland, L7, the Nymphs, and other femaleled underground groups. In her strongest song, “Doll Parts,” she turns introspective: “I want to be the girl with the most cake / He only loves those things because he loves to see them break / I think it’s all true-I am beyond fake / Someday you will ache like I ache. “Don’t worry baby, you will never stink so bad again,” she intones about a botched abortion. “Slit me open and suck my scars,” she sings about sex. Her chosen topics-rape and abortion, to name two-are extremely provocative. “ ‘Pretty on the Inside,’ ” writes Elizabeth Wurtzel in The New Yorker, “is such a cacophony-full of such grating, abrasive, and unpleasant sludges of noise-that very few people are likely to get through it once, let alone give it the repeated listenings it needs for you to discover that it’s probably the most compelling album to have been released in 1991.”Ĭourtney’s postfeminist stance (she has the power-she just wants to be loved) echoes throughout her songs. The record is intensely difficult to listen to-Courtney’s singing is a mix of shouting, screeching, and rasping-but her songwriting, which has been compared to Joni Mitchell’s, is powerful. Last August, Hole, which is much more extreme and less melodic than Nirvana, released Pretty on the Inside on Caroline Records, an independent that is a subsidiary of Virgin. She and Hole were just signed to a million-dollar record deal she is married to Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, and within the realm of the alternative-music scene, Courtney is now regarded as a train-wreck personality: she may be awful, but you can’t take your eyes off her. It looks as if, after a few false starts-an acting career that didn’t quite take, some stints in other bands that didn’t work out-Courtney is having her moment. She was just waiting for everyone else to wake up. More precisely, Courtney always thought she was a star. She has always known what she wanted and what she wanted was to be a star. With Courtney, it’s not so much scheming as it is focus. When she’s not talking, she doesn’t seem to be listening exactly but, rather, absorbing: Who is this person? What is his context? What can I learn/get from him? are the thoughts coursing through her brain. You get the sense that she has a monologue going twenty-four hours a day and that sometimes she includes others. From the moment Courtney sits down at a table in City, a restaurant near her home in Los Angeles, the verbal pyrotechnics begin. She has beautiful round blue-green eyes, which she has carefully made up, but the focus is on her mouth. Her skin, which has been heavily Pan-Caked and powdered to cover an outbreak of acne, is pasty-white, and her lips are painted bright red. She’s wearing black stockings with runs in them, a vintage dress that’s a size too small, and a pair of black clogs. The dark roots show on purpose-nothing about Courtney is an accident-and today she’s attached a plastic hair clip in the shape of a bow to a few strands. She’s tall and big-boned and her shoulder-length hair is cut like a mop and dyed yellow-blond. When you’re an hour late, you can really make an entrance. But by that time Courtney is gone-she’s off keeping someone else waiting.
Until they can’t stand it anymore and then they get mad, fed up, and move on. She assumes that they will forgive her as they stare at the clock and stare at the door and wonder where the hell she is. She’s late for band rehearsals, she was late when she used to strip, she was even an hour late for a meeting with a record-company executive who wanted to sign her band, Hole. She’s nearly always late, and not just ten, fifteen minutes late, but usually more like an hour past the time she’s said she’ll be someplace.
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